How much can you do with D&D official free stuff?
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Free rules (or starter/basic rules, call them what you want, for whatever rpg) are becoming more popular in these days. Sure they are a sort of countermeasure to piracy, but I want to believe that they are also an introduction for newfound role players and, most importantly, for people who can't afford the luxury of an hobby like ttrpgs. This is a delicate topic for everyone to address: those who create rpgs deserve the money (even the big companies, although they should lower their share of profit or donate part of it to non-profit organizations, because endless growth is an utopia), but people who are unfortunate should not be ostracized from this hobby just because of "capitalism". This is where, to me, free/basic/starter rules come into play.
D&D has numerous free resources and I've been fascinated by the opportunity to try and create something just using those. When creating an adventure or campaign, the limit is not the written material that you have, but your immagination. You can still tweak monsters or create them from scratch, make new races or classes, backgrounds and so on.
Now I'll throw some links, which cover all the materials that are officially free, then we'll talk about what these pdfs do contain.
D&D 5e Basic Rules
D&D 5e System Reference Document 5.1
Elemental Evil Player's Companion
Hoard of the Dragon Queen Online Supplement
The Rise of Tiamat Online Supplement
Princes of the Apocalypse Online Supplement
Sage Advice Compendium
Character sheets and pre-generated characters
See, that's actually a lot of documents!
Basic Rules: if you are new to the game, simply get this first. It will teach you the game and it provides some races (Hill and Mountain Dwarf, High and Wood Elf, Lightfoot and Stout Halfling, Human and Variant Human) and some classes/subclasses (Cleric of Life Domain, Champion Fighter, Rogue Thief and Wizard of the School of Evocation). With this you'll be able to form the most classic party ever, covering all the primary roles (healer, dps/tank, skill-monkey and magic user). Other sections will contain equipment, spells, monsters and DM rules. Understand that with enough immagination and will, you could play D&D forever with just this rules. Not bad.
D&D 5e SRD: this is a particular document. In fact it is not strictly meant to be a player's resource, but a third party asset to develop 5e based products. As such it presents a similar set of rule to those in the previous pdf, but it expands races and classes, to the point that it appears as a diminished version of the Player's Handbook (it lacks some subraces and only one subclass per class is presented). This is the document upon which D&D Beyond is built, for example. It also has some monsters that were not present in the Basic Rules. To be honest, instead of using this document I would simply go to D&D Beyond, because there the content is at least better formatted. But nonetheless it is a useful pdf.
Elemental Evil Player's Companion: of all the free material, this is my favorite. It was released in tandem with the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure and it covers new races (Aarakocra, Genasi, Goliath and Deep Gnomes) and new spells. If you want to expand the Basic Rules, this is were I'd suggest you to go. Note that being this a free resource, these races are also freely available on D&D Beyond.
The three Online Supplements (Hoard of the Dragon Queen, Rise of Tiamat and Princes of the Apocalypse): these three are an underrated goldmine for DMs who use only the free rules. They were released along the specific adventures, to make players buy and run them even if they only had the free ruleset. In short, they contain monsters and other things that were originally in the Monster Manual or other paid books. This happened only for these three adventures, since they were the first released in the fifth edition and sadly was never repeated.
Sage Advice Compendium: this pdf includes FAQs and links to the Erratas of D&D 5e. It does not provide content per se, but is useful for everyone.
Character sheets and pre-generated characters: simply useful. The pre-generated characters are handy for new players.
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If you feel experimental, there's more. Unearthed Arcanas are playtest rules that the developers sometimes publish in order to see the public's reaction. Among those we can find races, subraces, classes, subclasses, feats, spells, additional rules and so on. This is an enormous tank of semi-official content that comes with a warning: it is not balanced and not official. It's perfectly fine to try it out in your home game though. Combined with the free rules, it gives an incredible amount of options.
Other stuff that comes into my mind:
Firbolg: this race was previewed when Volo's Guide to Monsters was getting released. Since the link to this pdf is public (you can find it digging into D&D's official website news) and is still working, I would consider it part of the free rules that we have at our disposal.
Dragon+: this is the official magazine of D&D. A great bit of it just showcases new products, talks about upcoming books (which is nice anyway) or generally talks about the hobby, but the remaining is usually material you can download for free, like maps, excerpts from books, old magazine entries (stuff from the past editions) and sometimes even adventures or monsters.
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